A WorkManager Pitfall: Modifying a Scheduled Worker

Overview

When using WorkManager, you define a Worker subclass, optionally add some constraints and enqueue it with WorkManager so that your work will happen sometime later.

How bad things might happen

But what happens if:

you schedule a job for sometime in the future

before the job runs, you update your app to rename, move or delete the Worker class?

WorkManager will try to create the Worker you told it to use but will be unable to find that class.

Why would anyone do that?

Perhaps your worker was part of an experimental feature you were building, but later decided to pull. Perhaps you refactored a worker to have a different name and/or package.

Isn’t that a really silly thing to do?

Refactoring most code shouldn’t be dangerous and if you are never going to need a Worker again, there’s a downside to leaving unused code in your APK. So refactoring or removing a Worker isn’t a silly mistake; it might genuinely be something you need to do.

This is a scenario that might bite you. This post details what happens in this scenario and why, and offers particular advice for handling this situation when using a custom WorkerFactory.

Scheduling work to happen

You tell WorkManager which Worker should run as part of building the work request.

At the stage of enqueuing the work, an instance of your Workeris not yet created. It won’t be created until WorkManager decides your work should run.

When it’s time to work

When the time comes for your work to run, an instance of your Worker will be instantiated. By default, this will be done by WorkerFactory.

The problem is that if you have removed the Worker subclass from your APK (or moved/renamed it), then the WorkerFactory will be handed the class name as it was when you scheduled the work, and asked to create a new instance of it. This will fail.

Example

Monday

You release v1 of your app.

You have a worker called com.foo.MyWorker

You schedule work for that worker to happen in 2 days’ time

Tuesday

You move MyWorker class to com.bar.MyWorker

You release v2 of your app

Wednesday

WorkManager will try to create an instance of com.foo.MyWorker which doesn’t exist.

Another scenario is if instead of moving com.foo.MyWorker, you delete it altogether.

In this case, you might be surprised to see WorkManager still attempting to create an instance of com.foo.MyWorker.

What will happen?

Your job won’t run as expected. How major a bug that is will depend on your app and what the job was supposed to do.

As well as not running, there might be another consequence: the app might crash. The default WorkerFactory will handle this scenario safely enough to not crash, but the job still won’t run.

If you are using a custom WorkerFactory, then you will have to ensure you are creating Worker instances in a safe way that is resilient to these types of changes.

Custom WorkerFactory

In some use cases you might find yourself registering a custom WorkerFactory implementation. This is particularly useful if you want to use Dagger to inject objects into your Worker subclass.

What’s the problem here? As in the above example, if you originally enqueued a work request using com.foo.MyWorker then that will be passed into the createWorker() function as the workerClassName: String parameter.

In the naive implementation above, com.foo.MyWorker no longer exists, and attempts to find the class for it will result in a ClassNotFoundException being thrown.

Safer Implementation of CustomWorkerFactory

We need to wrap the attempts at finding the class in a try/catch block, ensuring we catch ClassNotFoundException since we now know how and why that might happen.